Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative · Article 5 of 24
The Vision Plan was not written in one workshop. Phase 1 ran from fall 2021 through fall 2022. Phase 2 opened the work to the public in January 2023 and carried it through a final review in June 2024, with early outcomes still landing in late 2024 and early 2025. The plan notes that it was written across four years, so some statistics reflect a moment before the 2025 release.
Phase 1: five building blocks
Phase 1 gathered stakeholders, set goals, and did the research. Its five blocks were stakeholder engagement, existing-plan analysis and a land-manager needs assessment, data-hub development, an industry assessment, and a management-model analysis. The purpose was to gather data already on the shelf and to solicit past, present, and future concerns before asking the public to react to a blank page. This phase also produced the name and brand: Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative.
Phase 2: the public, then the focus groups
Phase 2 took that material to communities across the three counties. Themes that rose in both the research and the listening sessions became focus groups. At the same time the data hub was rebuilt around a mapping tool. Recommendations were then formed by the task force and leadership team. The phase summary says those recommendations first centered on five themes, then settled into seven vision statements with strategies and action items.
What “done” meant
By the end, the plan had a public record, a set of values, decision-support tools, a regional project list, and a proposed implementation structure. It also had one outcome the original grant scope had not fully anticipated: a serious exploration of single-entity recreation management on the Pikes Peak recreation shed, later narrowed to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife conversation. That thread is its own article. The process point is simpler. The plan keeps saying it did not start from zero, and it does not end at publication.
Source: Outdoor Pikes Peak Initiative Vision Plan 2025, prepared through the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance as the local Colorado Outdoor Regional Partnership, with support from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Great Outdoors Colorado. Project team: PPORA, Trails and Open Space Coalition, N.E.S. Inc., Bachman PR, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Geography Department. The plan was written across a four-year process and released in 2025; some statistics reflect a point in time before publication. Process, pages 32 and 41–42; Phase 2 summary, pages 69–70.
